Committed to the advancement of poetry
Join the Bristol Poetry Institute to celebrate the 60th anniversary of US poet Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, purportedly written during the poet’s lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art. We will gather together to read the book aloud over our own sack lunches. All welcome!
Lunch with Lunch Poems
Thursday 9 May
1-2 PM
Royal Fort Gardens (near the mirrors), Bristol BS8 1UH
Rain location: PHYS BLDG 3.34
We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading by Don Paterson will take place on 7 February 2024 at 6PM in the Wills Memorial Building Great Hall.
The Bristol Poetry Institute, with the support of the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages, are very pleased to present Don Paterson as this year’s annual reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading. A 30-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.
Don Paterson is the author of numerous works of poetry and non-fiction; his writing has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009; he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for many years taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry in the School of English. From 1997 to 2022, Paterson was poetry editor at Picador. For most of his life he has also worked as a jazz musician and composer. He lives in Kirriemuir, Scotland.
Award-winning poet Ruth Padel will read her new poems inspired by the ‘Snake Goddess’ figurines found at Knossos (Crete) over a century ago. This event is part of the collaborative, international project ‘The Many Lives of a Snake Goddess‘ and is organised in collaboration with the IGRCT.
The Peel Lecture Theatre, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, BS8 1SS
Thu 16 Nov 2023 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Please join us downstairs in the Hepple Room for a free wine reception after the event.
If you are unable to join us in-person, you can register to watch online (you do not need to book a place via TicketTailor)
Join four great contemporary poets as they read from their poetry and discuss its response to the environment and the environmental crisis.
Thu, 25 May 2023 16:30 – 19:30 BST
Old Council Chamber
Wills Memorial Building Tower
Queens Road Bristol BS8 1RJ
Schedule
4.30-5.15pm Poet’s panel : Hugh Dunkerley, Carrie Etter and Yvonne Reddick
5.15-5.30 Alycia Pirmohamed (online reading)
5.30 Drinks Break
6pm -7 Live Reading by Hugh Dunkerley, Carrie Etter and Yvonne Reddick
Earlier in the afternoon there will be academic papers on ‘Climate Crisis, Lyric Crisis?: Contemporary Poetry and the Environment’. If you would like to attend the papers or indeed give a paper yourself, please email m.malay@bristol.ac.uk or William.Wootten@bristol.ac.uk
Poets
Hugh Dunkerley’s poetry collections include Hare (Cinnamon Press, 2010) and Kin (2019). He also writes on literature and environment as well as being a short story writer. Hugh’s award winning lecture, ‘Some Thoughts on Poetry and Fracking’, was delivered at the 2016 Hay International Festival. He is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Chichester.
Carrie Etter’s poetry collections include The Tethers (Seren, 2009), Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2012), Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014) and The Weather in Normal (Seren, 2018). She is also an essayist, short story writer and reviewer, and the editor of Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearman, 2010) and Linda Lamus’s posthumous A Crater the Size of Calcutta (2015). An U.S. born poet resident in England, Carrie is recipient of the 2009 London New Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol.
Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon, 2022), as well as the pamphlets Hinge (Ignition Press, 2020) and Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press, 2018) and the collaborative essay Second Memory, co-authored with Pratyusha. A Canadian-born poet based in Scotland, Alycia is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge.
Yvonne Reddick is the author of the collection Burning Season (Cinnamon Press, 2023) and the pamphlet Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), which won the Mslexia Magazine Pamphlet Competition as well as the critical book Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is the recipient of a Leadership Fellowship from AHRC, and has received a Northern Writer’s Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and a place on the 2017-18 Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire.
This event is organised by the Bristol Poetry Institute together with the Centre for Environmental Humanities.
Dr Lesel Dawson and Dr William Wootten will lead a discussion of the grief expressed in some poems by Denise Riley.
The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations of four Catalan poets, with the special collaboration of Dominic Jaeckle, writer and editor of Tenement Press.
Temporary Archives, Poetry by Women of Latin America edited by Juana Adcock and Jèssica Pujol Duran
Latin America is known to be producing some of the most exciting literature in the world today. With the region’s rich intersecting traditions, history of migrations, political movements, and commitment to poetic innovation, the women poets who are currently working there are some of the fiercest and most creative voices in the 21st century. Temporary Archives brings together 24 of the most widely-read women poets working in Spanish, Portuguese and indigenous languages throughout the Latin American continent, who are in dialogue with each other, their traditions, and with the current literatures and political movements in the region. With a vibrant women’s movement gaining increasing traction in countries such as Chile, Argentina and Mexico, this anthology is a timely contribution to the works currently being published in English translation.
Jèssica Pujol Duran (Barcelona, 1982) is a poet, translator, and researcher, currently working as Assistant Professor at the University of Santiago de Chile. In 2016, she earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London, entitled ‘From Experimental to Experimentalism: Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar in Paris 1963-1973’; in 2017 she was granted funding from the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt) in Chile to undertake a Postdoctoral project entitled ‘La poética de lo experimental. Poesía multimodal en hispanoamérica’. Her conferences and publications are in the field of comparative literature, experimental translation, and Latin American studies. She is the editor of Alba Londres. Culture in Translation, a magazine that publishes Latin American poetry in translation in the UK, and her most recent publications include a translation of poet Lisa Robertson, Los hombres (Bisturí10, 2022); a selection and co-translation of Sean Bonney’s work, La revolución de las esferas celestes (Pez Espiral, 2022); a book of poems, El campo envolvente (LP5 Editora, 2021), and the anthology Temporary Archives, Poetry by Women of Latin America (Arc Publications, 2022).
We are delighted to announce that this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading will be delivered by Denise Riley.
[Update 12/12/22: This event has unfortunately been cancelled due to illness and we are working to reschedule in 2023.]
Over the last five decades, Denise Riley has steadily acquired the reputation of being, in the words of Simon Armitage, ‘one of the best poets around’. Sarah Perry, writer of The Essex Serepent, and Max Porter, writer of Grief is a Thing With Feathers, each called her 2016 volume, Say Something Back ‘the best thing I’ve read in ages’, while Robert Macfarlane declared the book’s ‘heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years’. 2022 sees the much anticipated publication of its successor, Lurex. The evening promises to be enjoyable, thought provoking and moving.
Admissions to the 2022 Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading are free but booking will be essential.
April is the cruellest month | The Waste Land Lecture
Date: Friday 1st April 2022
Time: 17:30
Tickets: From £0.00
Venue: Bristol Central Library
To mark this year’s 100th anniversary of The Waste Land, Jim McCue will consider why we are still reading T. S. Eliot’s poem, how our understanding of it has changed, and what was meant by “editing” it as part of a 2,000-page scholarly edition of the poetry.
Radical Translation | with Girasol Press
Date: Saturday 9th April 2022
Time: 17:00
Tickets: From £0.00
Venue: Wills Memorial Building (G25), Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1QE
Radical Translation explores politically and artistically “radical” approaches to poetry in translation, featuring poets and translators published by or connected with Bristol-based small publisher Girasol Press. We’ll hear from Say, Spirit, Sheffield-based poet Alex Cocker’s experimental translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, which tease out questions of androgyny, queer desire and the “trans” in translation. There will be readings of new work from Latinx poet and translator Juana Adcock, whose poetry explores living between languages and the violence of present-day Mexico, and from the writer and translator Jessica Sequeira, whose fiercely hybrid texts transgress boundaries of language and genre. Lastly, the afternoon will feature video contributions in Ch’ol and Tsotsil, as well as Spanish and English, from three Mexican poets (Canario de la Cruz, Edgar Darinel García, and Miriam Esperanza Hernández Vázquez) included in Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest. Jukub, the Ch’ol word for canoe, alludes to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation’s maritime delegation, which in 2021 sailed to Europe to mark 500 years since the “conquest” of Mexico in 1521. As a publisher, Girasol Press is interested in experimental approaches to translation and in the tactility and radical slowness of book-arts and antiquated print technologies, such as their trusty Adana 8×5!
Diana Bellessi | To Love A Woman/Amar a una mujer
Date: Saturday 9th April 2022
Time: 18:30
Tickets: From £0.00
Venue: Wills Memorial Building (G25), Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1QE
Join Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi and translator Leo Boix to celebrate the publication of To Love A Woman. With support from Polish multilingual poet Bohdan Piasecki. Presented in partnership with the Poetry Translation Centre. Bellessi is a groundbreaking writer who has been credited as the godmother of LGBTQI+ poetry in Latin America. Over the decades she has championed feminist and queer issues and themes, and has exerted a strong influence on prominent poets and writers from the 1980’s through to the present day. Bellessi’s direct, simple aesthetic style was adopted, in part, to speak directly to ordinary people of Argentina over the literary intelligentsia, part of her deep commitment to highlighting the social condition of the working class in Latin America, alongside progressive politics and ecological conservation. A prolific writer, Bellessi has published 25 books and this selection draws from the whole range, charting the progression and evolution of her poetry. Largely untranslated until now, The Poetry Translation Centre is proud to be publishing this collection, many of the poems appearing in English for the first time. Bellessi and Boix will be reading from To Love A Woman in the original Spanish with English translations, and discussing her life and work. While the BPI has not organised this event, we are excited that it continues our engagement with Bellessi and Boix, following a PTC and BPI-hosted translation workshop led by Boix last spring.
Poetry Aloud | Featuring Daljit Nagra
Date: Sunday 10th April 2022
Time: 14:00
Tickets: From £0.00
Venue: St. George’s Bristol, Great George St, Bristol BS1 5RR
A free, fun and inspiring afternoon for children, young people and families with top poets and musicians. Children and young people from schools in Bristol and the surrounding areas will perform their chosen poems, old and new, and poems they have written themselves. This event is presented in partnership with Poetry By Heart. Children and young people, aged 7-18, can sign up to perform a poem of their choice by contacting info@poetrybyheart.org.uk. The event will feature special performances from former BPI Annual Reader Daljit Nagra and clare potter, and a poetry and music collaboration by Bob Walton and JOW.
Thu, 25 November 2021
18:30 – 19:30 GMT
Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building
Queen’s Road, Clifton Triangle
Bristol, BS8 1RJ
We are very pleased to present Roger Robinson as this year’s Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reader. The event will last one hour and comprise of a poetry reading and a question and answer session. A 20-minute book signing with the poet will follow the reading.
Roger Robinson is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2020, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the Black-British writing canon. His latest collection ‘A Portable Paradise’ was a New Statesman book of the year. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and was shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, The Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2020.
He has received commissions from The National Trust, London Open House, BBC, The National Portrait Gallery, V&A, INIVA, MK Gallery and Theatre Royal Stratford East where he also was associate artist.
He is an experienced workshop leader and has toured extensively with the British Council. His workshops have been part of a shortlist for the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries and were also a part of the Webby Award winning Barbican’s Can I Have A Word. He is co-founder of both Spoke Lab and the international writing collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is the lead vocalist and lyricist for King Midas Sound and has also recorded solo albums with Jahtari Records.
